Oh, I can’t wait for the sympathy piece on Auschwitz guards to drop any day now. They must have seen some very, very, very difficult things too, poor souls.
Gil Hochberg described “shooting and crying” as a soldier being “sorry for things I had to do.” This “non-apologetic apology” was the self-critique model advanced in Israel in many politically reflective works of literature and cinema as “a way of maintaining the nation’s self-image as youthful and innocent. Along with its sense of vocation against the reality of war, growing military violence, occupation, invasion, [there was] […] an overall sense that things were going wrong.”
Interesting read thanks.
Karen Grumberg noted that “the Zionist soldier, a man with a conscience, loathes violence but realizes he must act violently to survive; the dilemma causes him to weep while pulling the trigger. Looking inward, he despairs at the violence he feels compelled to enact this way because he fears his moral corruption.”
Amir Vodka wrote “It typically depicts the IDF in a critical light, as a traumatizer of young soldiers, yet the genre itself is often criticized for turning the assailants into victims, and in a sense allowing the continuation of war under the guise of self-victimization.”
So, basically every war movie the US makes about itself.
The last sentence is fucked up. If you’re running over hundreds of people how in the fuck do you know they are terrorists. These people are intentionally and knowingly committing war crimes then come back home and cry about how this all made them so sad.
If the IDF is killing people, then they are terrorists. Not the other way around. You are to be checked for antisemitism/glorification of terrorism. Please report to your nearest IDF bulldozer.
Relevant, from a comment I wrote below that is buried under too many other comments:
If going to jail is the penalty for not joining the IDF, it is the moral thing to do and should be worn like a badge of honor. It’s not complicated at all unless you literally have a death penalty for not joining. I don’t care how controversial this is: if as an IDF terrorist you don’t commit a mutiny, desert, or off yourself, congratulations, you’ve net increased the evil in the world.
Sympathizing with the IDF is 1:1 the exact same as sympathizing with the SS and anyone who says otherwise has both fingers in their ears and yelling nanananana until the crunching noises under their bulldozers stop.
You cannot be systematically eradicating a people you consider inferior and also pretend you have any moral high ground. You cannot bomb hospitals and ambulances and homes and schools and pretend like you are the good guy. You cannot set up viewing platforms to have your kids watch the destruction with your own eyes and claim to be the good guy.
Not to make this about me but I’ve been running myself ragged volunteering at the shelters here in a safer part Lebanon and I’m still fucked up over feeling like I’m not doing enough. Rotting at home will make me feel even worse. I went outside for a walk and wanted to throw up, feeling guilty over being able to go outside and walk to destress as people’s homes get carpet bombed more intensely than legitimate military targets. I know damn well that if I lost my own home these shelters are full and I would have literally nowhere to go. And more people are losing their homes every hour. People are fleeing to Syria and Iraq for safety, even as the border crossings are getting hit as well.
This is beyond ”normal” human evil. If any other army was doing this we would have rows of criminals hanging from cranes in The Hague, instead we have to watch them smugly tell us we’re next in a speech from the UN. For the unforgivable crime of being born on land that apparently exists only for colonization.
Do not let anyone lie to you. A Holocaust is happening right now and it is exactly as evil as the one the Nazis committed.
I’ve been running myself ragged volunteering at the shelters here in a safer part Lebanon and I’m still fucked up over feeling like I’m not doing enough. Rotting at home will make me feel even worse. I went outside for a walk and wanted to throw up, feeling guilty over being able to go outside and walk to destress as people’s homes get carpet bombed more intensely than legitimate military targets
Remember the amount of suffering a single human can help to alleviate is finite. You can’t save everyone, and you absolutely can kill yourself in attempting to save everyone. War is bigger than any one person, and there is a point where you have done what you can do and you have to make peace with that
I am so sorry for what you’re going through, and for what my country (the US) is paying for. But please don’t begrudge yourself a small break. You can’t help others if you can’t even stand up.
I’m so, so sorry. I wish our politicans would listen when we tell them to stop this madness.
Anyone who runs is Hamas. Anyone who stands still is well disciplined Hamas.
Ask Rachel Corrie, who was similarly run over by a bulldozer protecting Palestinian land. It’s been over 20 years and the US still doesn’t give a single shit about Israel murdering it’s own citizens.
Yeah I remember reading about her. She was an incredibly brave woman. The most horrifying part was reading about the IDF soldiers who had a pancake party to mock her death.
was reading about the IDF soldiers who had a pancake party to mock her death.
Yeah, they’ve really got PTSD from what they do. /s
Give me a fucking break.
Not just soldiers.
Look at how well Israeli propaganda is working abroad. Now imagine how well it must be working on the israeli population.
Anyone who runs is a terrorist anyone who doesn’t run is a lazy terrorist.
reminds me of this bit:
“not only will america go to your country and kill all your people but they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”
For context, this is from Frankie Boyle’s 2016 Hurt Like You’ve Never Been Loved.
I reread that in his voice.
In the aughts, once the US torture programs started getting public attention around 2003, I did my obsessive thing on the German Reich and the Holocaust.
During Operation Barbarossa, the SS was experimenting with eradication methods. The most common was the pogrom, endorsing the locals to massacre the undesirables. When they weren’t undesirable enough or it was the whole village, the einsatzgruppen (death squads) had to come do it, usually forcing them to dig a mass grave and then executing them along the side.
It was messy and brutal and gross, and there was high turnover among the death squads (the US has a similar problem with its combat drone operators). And this was a major problem.
The SS experimented with other ideas, including deathwagons that would pipe the vehicle’s exhaust into an enclosed chamber to kill dozens at a time, but even that was too harsh and too slow.
This is how the prototype genocide machine was made at Auschwitz. The program was contrived so no one who interacted with the live prisoners also interacted with the dead corpses. The guy who pushed the execute button was two persons removed in the chain of command from the guy who signed off on the execution order, and none of those people had to face the prisoners or the outcome. The point specifically was to make the process of massacre less stressful for the people involved.
My opinion of humanity was already so low…
It’s funny, I had the opposite reaction, I see this as pretty strong evidence of our decency. It’s really, really hard to get most people to behave this way, and the ones who do wind up fucked up from it (as they should).
True. It’s hard to make people kill, but it’s much too hard to teach soldiers to refuse an amoral order.
There was a Sonderkommando of Jews in Auschwitz forced calm down inmates before murdering them and to rob and cremate them afterwards. Exactly to keep the psychic toll lower on the SS and to ensure fewer witnesses.
Everyone: “It seems we, as humans, have a pretty strong dislike of executing other humans. A biological aversion to commiting genocide, one might say.”
Nazis: “Halten Sie mein Bier!”
But in all seriousness, your comment reminded me of “The Banality of Evil”.
For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.
— Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
One of the reasons for creating the system of death camps was that Nazi soldiers and policemen tasked with murdering Jewish people and other undesirables had elevated rates of PTSD. Also, during the Cultural Revolution, the People’s liberation Army switched to a lower caliber sidearm because all the executions were giving them carpel tunnel.
You don’t want to loose sight of humanity just because you’re committing atrocity.
I know that another driving force for the gas chambers was to preserve ammunition.
The earliest versions of gas chambers were essentially “piping truck exhaust into a building.” They moved on from that in order to preserve metal (from the piping), fuel, and vehicles for other purposes.
I think they were using vans or buses, not filling buildings with carbon monoxide. Smaller spaces.
Maybe? I know for sure they were doing piping into a building early on.
That doesn’t seem very efficient if you want to gas dozens of people at once, which happened many times.
And yet, they still did it
They did it throughout the war and not merely at the start? So weird that there’s photographic and video evidence of people being gassed in buildings then.
Edit - Here’s evidence that the Germans used chambers (often called “showers”) from 1941 onwards:
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-camps/types-of-camps/ https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gassing-operations
While I’m sure vans were still used for their mobility/convenience and in cases where not many people were to be executed, Germany created extermination camps specifically to kill people (in more ways than just gassing) and those locations contained constructed buildings meant for execution with gas, not vans.
Even a few concentration camps had their own gas chambers, which were not vans, that were used to execute people that could no longer do forced labour.
Holy Shit Dude.
When extermination methods were tested to relieve the Einsatzgruppen which had up to that point in the war been shooting people close up, by hand, gas vans were used. As tests. Until Zyklon B was introduced.
I don’t know what you’re on, but it is a historic fact that before the gas chambers were used, gas vans were a method of murder.
I didn’t deny that, it’s in the links I posted. What I deny was that vans were the dominant method after 1941.
i sincerely hope his actions haunt him for the rest of his pathetic life
I’m pretty sure they did.
Six months after he was first sent to fight, he was struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder […] Before he was due to redeploy, he took his own life.
Too cowardly to do anything useful to make amends. Just let another conscript fill his space.
Brave enough to drive over Palestinians and call them “terrorists in their hundreds”. Not brave enough to stand up to criticism from his countrymen. This is what spending billions of dollars on an asymmetrical war gets you: a system in which the weakest people can still take the lives of hundreds before being thrown away themselves.
Wait… He crushed HUNDREDS of people with a bulldozer in less than 6 months‽ What the actual fuck.
Yeah, the IDF bombed buildings, then the bulldozers came in to clear the streets so the tanks could go through. At no point was anyone allowed to try to rescue anyone from the rubble, and those people are definitely not counted in the official death statistics. We’ll never really know how many people were killed.
Indoctrination is a hell of a drug.
Not saying these guys should be absolved, but they’re doing this because they think they’re the good guys/helping out.
We should be lamblasting their leadership and all of Israel’s parliament that’s enabling this.
But sometimes, soldiers are just soldiers/grunts. US Soldiers have similar PTSD after Afghanistan and Iraq. Not absolving them of sins, but when you’re trained for most of your adult life to take orders and not question them, and then those orders include killing innocents, it’s difficult to break from the indoctrination/control a group has had over you in the moment. Usually it’s not until you’re finished with your tour and you’re back home and had time to decompress that you realize the horrors you witnessed and perpetuated.
Again, not justifying it in any way, but if we don’t humanize Israeli soldiers, we run the risk of turning them into boogeymen like we did the Nazis. They were human too, and by not acknowledging that and how far humanity can go when they are supporting nationalist movements, we do great harm to any attempt to catch and correct these sort of things early.
There’s no switch that gets flipped that turns people into monsters. The worst atrocities ever committed upon humanity were by other humans. We need to acknowledge that they’re all human, or we risk repeating history.
They made a choice, do not absolve people of what they are doing and continue to do, especially if it’s fucking genocide, that’s literally how these things happen as well as the Holocaust.
At some point, people have to stand up and say no, voice their concerns, and just simply do the right thing.
Literally read what you wrote, the world already did what you are scared about to the Palestinians and is continuing to do so, are you tone deaf?
How about we fucking Humanize Palestine
I don’t think it’s either/or, having empathy for someone who killed himself because of the horrible things his country persuaded him to do doesn’t preclude having empathy for his victims, and it doesn’t mean absolving the crime. It is reality that everyone involved is victimized by war.
the world already did what you are scared about to the Palestinians and is continuing to do so
Part of how this was done is by using the emotional weight of atrocities for dehumanization of those claimed to be responsible. You might say that we don’t need to acknowledge the humanity of everyone universally, because the murderers have crossed a clear line by their own free will. But there is a concerted effort to obfuscate that line and drag everyone into plausible complicity; mandatory military service, suppression and murder of journalists, manipulative propaganda campaigns, it’s all effective and hardly anyone is genuinely immune.
Which isn’t to say the framing in the OP article is right; saying slaughtering people like that is “difficult to accept”, “psychological trauma”, calling all the victims “terrorists”, makes what should be an issue of recognizing and reacting to injustice into a problem of medical treatment to get people to be ok with doing the evil things the state directs them to do. That’s more manipulative propaganda, and many people will be convinced by it. The simplest counter that is least subject to being twisted is the conviction that everyone is always human and should be treated with empathy, without exception.
You can preach empathy all you want, but your words reek of defense of an ongoing genocide. Would you do the same during the Holocaust?
“Oh hey sorry for the genocide but we need to have empathy for these Nazi soldiers so let them keep doing what they do.”
Straight garbage dude.
so let them keep doing what they do
Why would that be implied by anything I said?
Nah, you’re wasting your time I’m afraid. All supposed morals, righteousness, and outrage immediately go out the window when they can point to something bad a person has done.
And for the record, yes, what the person in the article did is abhorrent. It’s also not remotely surprising that it would fuck him up afterwards. But if anyone is celebrating him taking his own life, then you’re not any better at all.
Every time someone reduces an argument to “someone did a bad thing” and “people who disagree”, it’s the same argument. We’re talking about fascists and genocide, not pizza.
You are arguing for the dehumanization of the people of Israel. Dehumanizing the enemy is a reprehensible thing to do no matter the side no matter the conflict
How is “they are responsible for their own actions” dehumanizing? If anything the person you are responding to is arguing that IDF soldiers have free will.
Do not buy into the “we didn’t know!!!1!” and “we were indoctrinated!!!” bullshit. This is the exact same bullshit that “former” nazis sympathizers peddled after the war. It’s a lie. A transparent one at that.
Yes, the nazis’ methods of dehumanization were very effective. But that does not, for even a femtosecond, absolve anyone of cold-bloodedly murdering a Jew (or a Palestinian). It didn’t happen on accident, that soldier got in that position through a long series of conscious choices, and it came down to it he chose to run over hundreds of people from the comfort of his bulldozer. That is both very human, and one of the most unspeakable crimes of hate. Human in all the worst ways our species has ever devised.
Some crimes are just beyond forgiveness, because it isn’t in anyone’s power to forgive. Killing hundreds in an act of genocide is one such crime. To be human is many things, but being owed forgiveness is not one of them.
I’m sorry for the emotional message, I am assuming you are playing devil’s advocate in good faith but I can’t just let the dehumanization of innocent murdered civilians be compared to the harsh condemnation of the soldiers who killed them.
If going to jail is the penalty for not joining the IDF, it is the moral thing to do and should be worn like a badge of honor. It’s not complicated at all unless you literally have a death penalty for not joining. I don’t care how controversial this is: if as an IDF terrorist you don’t commit a mutiny, desert, or off yourself, congratulations, you’ve net increased the evil in the world.
Sympathizing with the IDF is 1:1 the exact same as sympathizing with the SS and anyone who says otherwise has both fingers in their ears and yelling nanananana until the crunching noises under their bulldozers stop.
You cannot be systematically eradicating a people you consider inferior and also pretend you have any moral high ground. You cannot bomb hospitals and ambulances and homes and schools and pretend like you are the good guy. You cannot set up viewing platforms to have your kids watch the destruction with your own eyes and claim to be the good guy.
Not to make this about me but I’ve been running myself ragged volunteering at the shelters here in a safer part Lebanon and I’m still fucked up over feeling like I’m not doing enough. Rotting at home will make me feel even worse. I went outside for a walk and wanted to throw up, feeling guilty over being able to go outside and walk to destress as people’s homes get carpet bombed more intensely than legitimate military targets. I know damn well that if I lost my own home these shelters are full and I would have literally nowhere to go. And more people are losing their homes every hour. People are fleeing to Syria and Iraq for safety, even as the border crossings are getting hit as well.
This is beyond ”normal” human evil. If any other army was doing this we would have rows of criminals hanging from cranes in The Hague, instead we have to watch them smugly tell us we’re next in a speech from the UN. For the unforgivable crime of being born on land that apparently exists only for colonization.
Do not let anyone lie to you. A Holocaust is happening right now and it is exactly as evil as the one the Nazis committed.
Yeah this is exactly what I am talking about thank you, and like you said this is literally Nazi sympathetic shit
No Im not. You are defending the ongoing dehumanization of the people of Palestine.
Yeah, I suppose it was traumatic, bombing food relief convoys and hospitals. You could have avoided a lot of that PTSD by refusing to follow illegal orders.
Also, get farked, CNN.
My interpretation of this is that some mid-level staffers at CNN pushed the story knowing exactly what was in it. Their bosses wouldn’t let them do obvious things, so they got a little subtle.
Ah yes, those hundreds of “terrorists” all nicely lined up in the road.
How the fuck do you run someone over with a bulldozer… no matter what i think of it’s not coming up good…
Riskiest click of the day. But I’m so glad I clicked it.
You win this thread.
Austin Powers was a war criminal!
That link stays blue
You would think it would be easy to find some poor conscript fuck who didn’t run over civilians in a bulldozer struggling with the fact that they were coerced into being part of a genocide, but no, CNN goes with the guy who crushed human beings. Even as attempted hasbara, that’s some high-level incompetence in CNN.
CNN has to run every story through the Israeli censor in their Jerusalem bureau. The only mainstream outlet that doesn’t go through that process is Al Jazeera, and Israel closed their offices.
Precisely: this is the story CNN and the IDF want you to see. No matter the CNN reader’s reaction, the policy will not change.
So they do the thing because it is a demonstration that they can do the thing without repercussions. Bullingdon Club type mentality.
I’m actually speechless.
I hope this guy suffers until his end.
If you run over HUNDREDS with a BULLDOZER, you deserve permanent PTSD to prevent you from ever fucking thinking of doing anything remotely like it again
I believe this particular quote is from a soldier who took his own life. How. Tragic.
Too bad about the order of operations
He offed himself because he was about to get sent back out to do it again and apparently the IDF were gonna refuse burial because he was a chicken shit that didn’t want to squeeze the organs out of more children.
Some other people need to suffer from this story than the ones actually suffering.
“So, there is no such thing as citizens,” he said, referring to the ability of Hamas fighters to blend with civilians. “This is terrorism.”
Fuck the IDF
Well when he said “this is terrorism” he was correct. Just that it’s the IDF terrorizing innocent people.
Poor guy. Did he also have to murder the little baby terrorists and their sobbing, horrified terrorist moms and terrorist sisters too? Poor fella. I hope he can muster the strength to do the right thing.
Fuck Israel and fuck conservatives (including neoliberals) who gleefully support this genocide. The wrong people are being erased.
There’s no such thing as a “correct” people to erase.
When it comes to people committing genocide, I disagree.
Well, did he have a choice?
ah yes… “I was only following orders” - Otto Adolf Eichmann
Yeah you can go to prison
He called the families he murdered terrorists. He’s lying about being “traumatized”.
Every word uttered by a conservative is deception or manipulation. The only terrorists in this story are the settlers committing genocide on the local residents.
This is basically Objectivism.
Wouldn’t it be cool if people who committed violent acts couldn’t actually be traumatized by those acts if they were unambiguously immoral. If people who did Evil were always consciously aware of it. If there was a moral order to the universe manifested in our bodies and in our works. One could then be sure that anyone who committed an act of evil and reported being traumatized by it was really lying.
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Everyone has a choice.
He has a choice now. The choice to end his own pathetic life or burn in mental anguish for the rest of his life. I hope he chooses whichever path leaves him and his the most miserable.
I swear this is almost trying to parody the title of the article about the 19 year old who was burned alive
I’m sure we’ll soon get an article about how the pilot felt sad about bombing a hospital.
Something about he at the end of a hard day of bombing schoolyards and hospitals filled with “human animals” going home to his young wife and 5 month old baby with a sad look on his face.
